The home page of the finishing industry®

This is one of a series. We welcome
news or editorial content from our readers, and will revise
this page each afternoon that we receive input.

Vote if We're Pompous and
Self-Important

by Ted Mooney, P.E.
<mooney@finishing.com>

December 8, 1998

Reading my own editorials on these pages, I feel that each is
fine if taken by itself (we're expected to hold a charitable
opinion of our own work). But taken in total--and I've written 37
editorials in the past year or so--I think that even my own mother
would have to find me pompous and self important.

So let me defend myself to my mother this way--

When was the last time you saw a "Letter to the Editor"
printed in Plating & Surface Finishing, Metal Finishing,
Products Finishing, or another journal serving our industry?
Contrariwise, when was the last time you saw a newspaper that
lacked a vibrant "Letters to the Editor" page? Or any
magazine (I don't care if we're talking Time, People,
Smithsonian, Road & Track or TV Guide ) that
lacked controversial letters to the editor?

Just as we do our country no favor by declining to vote and
just letting things settle themselves as they may, we do our
fellow finishers and fellow citizens no favor by honoring some vow
of silence. While it's fine to cast a ballot for officers of our
local AESF branch, the mechanism by which we really vote on
industry directions is by publicly expressing our opinions.

I hold no office in our industry and can offer no special
insight, so I don't want to pompously and self-importantly write
the majority of the editorial comment for this whole darned
industry. But our industry desperately, desperately, needs
publicly expressed opinion. So write a letter to the editor of any
of our trade journals, or for publication at an industry website,
or --please-- for publication right here. Are we okay on this,
Mom?